We've been frustrated for some time with mobility companies slowness in updating their routes and schedules. There's also an unwillingness to share their realtime GPS data so, there's a huge problem we as citizens face when we want to go from one place to the other and have that information readily available in one place.

What if we gave everyone the possibility to add/edit urban mobility routes and realtime positioning of its vehicles? This is what UrbanFlow is all about.

UrbanFlow is a tool for urban mobility management. We think that by giving the means to collaboratively add our own urban mobility networks to the cloud, we can all rely on better and up to date routes of multimodal transportation.

People can obviously vote on the quality of the data being added to the system, making it sustainable.

Data portability is also a worry we have, so we support an open standard format created by Google named Keyhole Markup Language, or KML. But our main purpose is to feed Google Maps, making it available to everyone through the already awesome Google Maps geographic dataset.

Using available GPSs on our cell phones, we can track these vehicles in real time, and since we have the routes we don't have GPS mislocationing, so ultimately, everyone has the ability to know where they are and improve our quality of life.

This is the latest multi-touch installation by SenseBloom. It’s located in the campus bar at the Computer Science Department of Coimbra University, Portugal.
Created with the intent of letting students and the research community explore new concepts in HCI by designing and creating applications for course projects or just for fun.

In terms of hardware, the display has an area of 2.8m x 1.05m and it consists of 2 XGA ultra short-throw projectors amounting to a total resolution of 2048x768. For the multitouch sensing, this is an LLP setup using 8 infrared lasers, 2 PS3 Eye cameras and a custom compiled version of the excellent CCV tracker, giving us a touch resolution of 1280x480. Also added to the SenseWall are 2 cameras above the display for computer vision applications, a microphone for sound input, speakers for sound output and an RFID reader.

Recorded during our latest multitouch workshop in Coimbra. Demo time at the SenseWall ;)

SMTUC (local bus company) provided us with GPS traces but we eventually needed to rewrite them due to GPS mislocationing.

The GoogleEarth KMZ/KML is now publicly available thanks to this effort.
We’ve also submitted to the Google Transit following the Google Transit Feed specification. This way everyone gets this for free and more on Google Maps ;)